On Criterion, I watched Peter Chan’s 1996 romantic drama Comrades: Almost a Love Story, starring Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung as two Chinese mainlanders striving to make money and achieve their dreams in Hong Kong, him as a naive innocent named Li Xiao-Jun, who barely speaks Cantonese and English, and is trying to raise money to bring his fiancée to Hong Kong; and her as a streetwise swindler named Li Qiao, who has several hustles going (working at McDonald’s and taking a commission from getting people into an English class), and plays the stock market to get rich. Both are lonely in the city, as immigrants who don’t have other friends around, so they become friends, and eventually they have a brief tryst, but break it off since Xiao-Jun is engaged.
Eventually, Xiao-Jun marries his fiancée, and Li Qiao marries a mob boss who she met while working as a masseuse. The movie spans over 10 years, where the two friends are loyal to their spouses but still having lingering feelings for each other, and both end up in New York City years later, on different paths that end up converging.
The movie made me think of movies like Before Sunrise and Past Lives, movies about old friends who keep a lingering attraction to each other despite living far apart with separate lives over a long period of time. I thought this was a decent movie, watching it for Maggie Cheung, and liking how it’s a story about loneliness and immigration and trying to make money to achieve one’s dream, and having a close bond with one another over a decade of life changes.
The movie also threads in the music of Teresa Teng, who was a Taiwanese pop idol of the 1970s through the 1990s until her death in 1995 at age 42 of either asthma or heart failure, her cause of death was never truly determined. She was one of the biggest Asian pop stars ever, and her music plays throughout the film, with the Chinese title of the film referring to her song “Tian Tian Mi” (literally “sweet honey, or “very sweet”).
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